


and plunge us in the flames

by fabrega



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Era, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 09:59:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7886743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The third thing Keith notices about Shiro, lying there unconscious on the table, is his arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and plunge us in the flames

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Milton, because I am incorrigible and because screamlet is a terrible influence. <3

The third thing Keith notices about Shiro, lying there unconscious on the table, is his arm. It's encased in metal from somewhere above the elbow, molded precisely along the contours of his muscles, the curves of his fingers. It doesn't occur to Keith until later that it might be a prosthesis; for now, it's just one thing on a long list of differences between the Shiro who went to space and the Shiro who came back.

(The second thing Keith notices is Shiro's hair, a startling shock of white above his eyes. The first thing Keith notices is Shiro's face, and the way his own heart judders in his chest.)

.

Keith had been thinking about Shiro coming back since the Kerberos mission had launched. He'd thought about it every day that the spacecraft had spent on its way to Pluto, had thought about it every day until the Galaxy Garrison had reported that the mission had been lost, had been thinking about it when he'd blown up at his instructors in a destructive and unforgivable way and had been kicked out of the Garrison. He knew, rationally, that if the mission was lost... But he'd kept daydreaming about it, about Shiro back on Earth, about Shiro walking through the door of the shack and looking at him and smiling.

When he finally does, Keith doesn't know what to say. He puts a hand on Shiro's shoulder and hopes that that's enough. He figures he'll figure it out--they've got all the time in the world, right? Keith can afford to give it a little space, to let them feel their way back to each other.

.

And then, of course, they end up with all the space in the universe.

.

The paladins all have to do the team-building exercise in the invisible maze, in all the combinations and permutations. Keith isn't sure anyone will--or could--do worse than he and Lance had, but on Shiro's first time in the maze, he reaches out gingerly with his right hand, which brushes the wall and completely short-circuits the maze. The walls start flickering in and out, and thick blue smoke starts billowing from the place Shiro had touched. In the control room, there's a lot of shouting and running and distress, and Keith's not sure anybody else sees the way Shiro doesn't seem to notice the chaos around him, staring down at his hand.

.

All the time Keith thought they had turns into two weeks of being paladins of Voltron, two weeks of non-stop crisis after crisis, two weeks where Shiro doesn't tell him anything and Keith doesn't ask. Keith is busy trying to figure out how to meaningfully bond with the guy who's been nursing a one-sided rivalry without him, how to trust the kid who's been lying to everybody, and how to--well, no, Hunk's actually a pretty good dude, that one isn't hard. He trusts that he and Shiro are good, that theirs is a bond that doesn't need the sort of maintenance Keith is putting in with the others.

Then the castle turns on them. It's not until afterward, when they are safely away, that Keith has time to think about how shaken Shiro had looked, how everyone else had faced a thing that had tested them specifically, how he has no idea what had happened to Shiro.

He finds Shiro at the entrance to the lion hangars. He is standing in front of the black paladin armor, staring intently past it. Keith does his best to wordlessly announce himself, making his footsteps heavy and clearing his throat, but Shiro doesn't seem to notice; he startles when Keith puts a hand on his shoulder.

"Hey, you doing okay?" Keith asks, offering Shiro a smile.

Shiro looks down at Keith's hand on his shoulder, then up at Keith's face. He gives an unconvincing smile in return and says, "Shouldn't you be asking Allura that? I'm not the one that had the rough day."

"The castle tried to murder all of us, Shiro, it's not a competition." Keith pauses, looks at the paladin suit, looks back at Shiro. "I know everybody else got pretty messed up by the castle's tricks." He sways sideways, bumping his hip into Shiro's. "Did I tell you that one of the programs from the training deck nearly killed me? Chased me out of the deck and around the castle."

"You had a sword-fight through a castle?" Shiro gives him a disbelieving look. "That sounds like fairy-tale stuff. Did you rescue a damsel in distress too?"

"No damsels, just Lance," Keith says. They both laugh, and Shiro nudges Keith back. They stand like that for a long moment, their bodies close, not saying anything.

Keith hates to break the comfortable silence, but eventually he asks: "Seriously, though--are you okay?"

Shiro waits a moment, thinking, before making a complicated shrugging motion. "I have to be."

"That's bullshit and you know it," Keith says, which elicits the first genuine smile he thinks he's seen from Shiro today.

"I think we're all saying 'quiznak' now instead of swearing."

"I _still_ don't think anybody is using that word correctly," Keith grumbles. "And the point stands: stuff's been rough for you. You don't have to be okay."

Shiro's gaze drops to his hand, then snaps back up to the black paladin suit. Keith knows he's not supposed to have noticed.

"You know you can talk to me, right? About whatever. It's been crazy, I know, and we haven't really had any time since you came back, and I--you can talk to me."

Shiro smiles at him. "I know, Keith. Thanks." He throws an arm around Keith's shoulders, and Keith lets his arm sneak around Shiro's waist and his head drop onto Shiro's shoulder. It is, honestly, the most like home that any place has felt to Keith in a very long time.

.

Then everything goes off the rails. Like, Keith had thought that everything had already gone off the rails, but they have reached, as Lance would probably say, a new level of rails-going-off. They do something stupid, and then they do something even more stupid, and by the time Keith tries to take on Emperor Zarkon by himself, it's really only safe to say that it's somewhere in the top three stupid decisions made by Team Voltron today. He hears himself say _whatever I can_ and then he is fighting for his life with the bastard who had taken Shiro away.

(That's not--that's not why he's doing it, is it? He'll wonder, later, when he has time to think.)

They escape. It wasn't a fight they were ever going to win; that they escaped is a victory itself. Even then, the escape is made complicated by one last blast from the Galra fleet: they are all thrown from the wormhole, out into space, and suddenly, Keith is alone again.

He realizes, somewhat belatedly, that he doesn't actually have any idea how the Voltron lions work. How long can they run for? What kind of energy source do they use? He knows that they sat idle for thousands of years, but they were presumably in some kind of power-saving mode, waiting for their paladins to arrive. How long does he have before he has to land? Before he has to do something drastic?

How are they ever going to find each other?

He realizes that Shiro is out there alone somewhere, probably having these thoughts too after a much worse day. The bottom drops out of his stomach.

"He'll be okay," Keith says aloud, trying to convince himself of it. "I'll be okay. We'll be okay."

.

They're all okay. Pidge manages to triangulate the something with the something else (they explain it to Keith, but Keith doesn't quite follow) and find their way back to the Castle; from there, Allura helps them triangulate even more things and launch a series of rescues.

"You should have gotten Shiro first," Keith says when Pidge and Lance arrive.

"It's good to see you too, Keith," Lance says. It is too early in this rescue for that much sarcasm.

"Thanks for rescuing me, Lance," Keith says flatly. "Now we're even. You still should have gotten Shiro first."

"Unfortunately," Pidge says, "My triangulation method doesn't let me know which lion is which, so we picked the closest ones and we're going from there. Besides, you got pretty beat up in that last fight--shouldn't we have been worried about you?"

Shiro is the last one they find, several days later. The Black Lion is parked on top of a mesa, the only dry land for miles and miles; Shiro is a ways away, knee-deep in water, staring up at the star-filled sky.

"He wouldn't abandon his lion for no reason," Pidge argues.

"It's been a tough week," Keith says, trying to keep the defeat from his voice. "Maybe he would."

They'd come ready for a fight, not...this. After some discussion, they decide that one of them should go get him on foot, and it turns out that that person is Lance. The others watch from the mesa as Lance wades out to Shiro. Even from this far away, Keith can tell that Shiro gets tense as Lance approaches. Over Lance's helmet comm, they hear Shiro ask: "Are you real?"

"Well, I mean, if I wasn't, I'd probably _say_ that I was, so that's not a very good question--" Lance starts.

"Lance! Not helpful!" Hunk reminds him via the comms.

"No," Lance amends, "No, I'm real. Definitely real, here to rescue you." He pauses, obviously expecting some kind of thanks or even acknowledgment that doesn't come. When it doesn't, he asks: "Are you okay?"

Shiro doesn't say no, but he doesn't say yes either.

.

Pidge has the shield up, blocking as best they can as this latest Galra monster lunges at them, blade arms whirling menacingly. They're not fighting back yet because they're in the middle of what Allura had made _absolutely sure_ they knew was the Tfinian Sacred Forest that they are _under no circumstances_ supposed to damage, so they are all moving Voltron, slowly and carefully, to someplace they can actually take this thing down. (The ice beam had proven ineffective, and the fire beam seemed like a bad idea, surrounded as they were by Sacred Trees.) When they finally reach a large clearing and Keith pulls out his sword, the swirl of emotions in his head from the other paladins resolves into overwhelming relief.

He chops one of the blade arms off entirely before parrying the other five, six, seven times, keeping the creature distracted enough for Lance to basically kick it in the face, disorienting it and allowing Keith to slice it cleanly in half. It is maybe the first time that Lance kicking a monster has done less harm than good.

When they're all back at the castle, Lance catches up to Keith and knocks into him with his shoulder. "You're _welcome_ ," Lance says.

Keith withdraws a little, mostly-annoyed by the contact but still riding on the high of the victory, and says, "For what?"

"I helped you kick that monster to death!" Lance says, beaming. He raises his right leg up and kicks wildly into the air several times (supplying his own laser noises with each kick, of course) before stopping and saying, "That was some clutch sword work, though, dude. Seriously, good work."

Keith allows himself to smile again and says, "Thanks. I could feel how relieved you all were when I finally was able to whip it out." As soon as the words have left his mouth, Keith regrets them. _Whip out his sword_ , what was he thinking, Lance is gonna have a field day with that one--

But Lance is just looking at him, genuine confusion on his face. "Relieved? What are you talking about?"

.

Shiro avoids him a lot, now that they're all back together. Keith doesn't realize it at first, because he sees Shiro as much as he sees any of the rest of his new teammates, but one day at dinner Hunk says something about the training he and Shiro had done that afternoon. No one else at the table looks surprised; they all nod along like of course this is no big deal, of course Shiro spends time with them outside of their mandated training. 

He tries to keep his voice steady as he asks, "You guys train together?" but he realizes that he is clutching at his silverware hard enough to have slightly bent his fork.

"Yeah, man," Lance says around a mouthful of food, "He and Hunk have been doing hand-to-hand training, and he and Pidge have been working on a protocol to download and decode Galra data more quickly, and he and _I_ \--"

Keith shoves back from the table abruptly enough to topple his chair and exits the room.

Pidge finds him later, seated quietly in one of the upstairs observation rooms, staring at the stars. 

Sol is out there somewhere, a tiny, insignificant speck of light amidst a sea of tiny, insignificant specks of light. Pluto is orbiting it, and Kerberos is orbiting Pluto, and Keith hates all of it. He wants to go home. He wishes he had a better idea of what that was.

Pidge looks apologetic. "We drew straws to see who would come find you," they say, dropping onto the window ledge next to Keith. "I also rigged it so Lance wouldn't draw the short straw, so, y'know, you're welcome."

Keith huffs a laugh. He's not sure what Pidge is doing here. He doesn't want--doesn't _need_ \--to be placated, and he lets his silence say so.

"I always figured you didn't need the kind of one-on-one time that we were getting," Pidge says, rather than letting the silence stretch on for too long. "You're a great pilot already, and I know you train by yourself, and--"

"I don't want to talk about it," Keith says. He doesn't.

Pidge, to their credit, clams up immediately. They tuck their legs up underneath themself and look out into space too. Keith wonders what they see when they look, if they're looking towards Earth or searching for something else, someone else.

"You knew him before, right? Shiro, I mean--" Pidge tries again.

"I don't want to talk about it," Keith says, tighter and quieter this time.

Pidge turns from the window to give Keith an inscrutable look. "You're not the only one who lost somebody out there, Keith," they say. "And he came back."

Keith very deliberately doesn't look back at Pidge. "You know, I'm not sure he did."

.

Keith makes an effort to spend more time in the training deck. He tells himself that it's important that he improve his fighting skills, that someday he'll encounter a fight where he won't be able to survive on his piloting alone. He tells himself that there's nothing wrong with self-betterment, and that that's what this is.

(He knows that it's easier to pretend that you're not being avoided if you're making the decision to be alone.)

.

Two weeks after their first visit to Tfin, they are invited back to celebrate the first free Festival of the Sacred Forest in generations. They are the guests of honor; without them, the Galra would still rule this planet, and without their quick thinking, there would be no Sacred Forest left to celebrate. Coran stays with the castle, but Allura and the Voltron paladins all attend--it's a welcome break from the stress of the last few weeks. They are greeted with much ceremony and escorted through the festival, thanked and feted at every turn. Keith thinks several times that he sees their hosts looking anxious and talking amongst themselves, so he keeps a wary eye on the Tfinians even while he takes in the Sacred Forest parade and enjoys the Sacred Forest feast.

It becomes apparent what their hosts had been nervous about when they reach the end of the evening and are brought to their overnight accommodations. It seems that the Tfinians had been expecting the three people they'd interacted with when the team had first arrived on Tfin: Princess Allura, Coran, and "the Voltron". This means they'd only prepared half as much of everything as they'd needed--feast portions, parade floats, and, it turns out, places for everyone to sleep.

Lance looks at the three small huts skeptically. "Even if we'd come as Voltron, how was it supposed to fit in here?"

Hunk shoves him and hisses, "You're being rude to our hosts!"

"Rude? How?"

"They've only got one eye!" Hunk explains, crossing his arms. "How were they supposed to know that they were looking at a giant robot far away and not a normal-sized robot close-up?"

"These rooms are pretty small," Pidge reports, coming out of the nearest hut. "We can probably fit, but it's gonna be close."

"We could go back to the castle," Hunk suggests, as the paladins all look at each other. "Or sleep in our lions?"

Allura lets out a scandalized gasp. "We cannot refuse the hospitality of the people of Tfin!"

"Even if there's not enough of it?" Shiro asks. "Because you get one of the huts, Allura, obviously, and then the five of us--"

"Pidge and I shall share," Allura declares. She grabs Pidge's arm and drags them close, and if Keith's not mistaken, Pidge looks...pleased? "Two beings per dwelling should not be a problem for one night." And with that, she and Pidge head for the first hut.

"I call Keith!" Lance shouts. "It'll be like a sleepover! We'll do our makeup and have pillow fights and stay up all night talking about _boys_ and--"

Keith takes a menacing step forward without realizing it, his face heating up, his hands clenched into fists. Hunk looks from Keith to Lance and back again, and says quickly, "Nope, Lance, you're staying with me." Lance's groan of protest drags out into a whine, but Hunk insists: "It's been a long day. Come on." He drags Lance towards the second of the three huts. To Keith and Shiro, he mouths _you're welcome_. Once Lance is deposited inside, Hunk comes back out and asks, carefully, "This is okay, right? You two are gonna be--"

"We'll be fine, Hunk. Thanks." Shiro's voice is warm; Keith has to look away.

The room is even smaller once they get into it, a bed and a single rickety chair and a door that leads off to a bathroom with a sink, a shower, and what is probably a toilet. Shiro moves around to the far side of the bed without asking and sinks onto it, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He takes a deep breath and lets it out as a sigh.

"What a day, right?" Keith says, for lack of anything better to say. He's not really sure what kind of day they'd had; once he'd spotted the nervous Tfinians, he'd had trouble paying attention to anything else.

"Yeah," Shiro says, turning back to Keith to give him a tired smile.

They shed the Voltron armor piece by piece and crawl into bed with little ceremony. There is barely enough room for both of them; Shiro curls up tightly on his right side with his back to Keith, while Keith lies on his back and tries not to toss and turn. 

Eventually he can't stand the silence, and he asks up into the darkness: "Did I do something wrong?"

He feels Shiro tense up next to him. "Did you--? Keith, you rescued me. You saved me. You're _here_. I can't ask any more of you than that."

"You don't--you don't have to ask. You've never had to ask," Keith says quietly. When Shiro doesn't respond, he says, "These hospitality rules are stupid. I'll go sleep in the Red Lion, it'll be fine--"

"Stay," Shiro says, and they both look down at where Shiro's robot fingers have wrapped around Keith's wrist.

(Keith wakes up the next morning with Shiro curled tightly around him, still asleep, and he wonders if maybe this will all be okay.)

.

Shiro avoids him even more, after that.

.

As the Voltron sword comes out, this time in response to a giant pterodactyl monster with a vicious beak and laser claws, it happens again, the wave of relief that overwhelms all the other emotions in Keith's head. He keys down the comms directly to Lance and asks, "There! You felt that, right?"

"Little busy here, Keith," Lance says. He sounds like he's speaking through gritted teeth, which is probably about right, given that the pterodactyl is doing its best to push them backwards into a very deep ravine. "What did I feel?"

"That--the relief. Everybody's feeling a lot of emotions right now, but the biggest one is relief. Do you not feel that?"

"Uh, no?" Lance says. On his console, Keith can see that Lance has switched the comms over to broadcast to all the paladins. "Is anybody feeling relieved? Keith says he's feeling relief, and I think his mental bond might be a little broken."

Lance receives negative responses from Hunk and Pidge, and Keith feels their curiosity and annoyance surfacing under the relief, but still--

Shiro, though--Shiro doesn't answer.

.

The thing is, Keith's not even sure what he wants from Shiro anymore. 

When Shiro had come back, he'd wanted the same easy intimacy they'd had before the Kerberos mission: shared glances, inside jokes, stolen kisses, waking up together. (Before he'd left on the Kerberos mission, Shiro had told Keith not to wait for him. Man, how much easier his life would be now if he'd listened.)

As they'd spent more time as paladins, it had become apparent that going back wasn't an option, and that was fine, that really was fine. Where they ended up wasn't anything like where they'd started; they've got the fate of the universe on their shoulders, they're a trillion miles from anything that might pass as home, they're making it up as they go--and the one person Keith would want to do something this spectacularly stupid with, he's _here_. He and Shiro could move forward together, find out what the future meant for them together.

The thing _is_ , Keith had woken up in the middle of the night on Tfin with Shiro's hand on his throat, glowing hot, and his own knife held instinctively to Shiro's throat in return. Shiro had looked horrified, and Keith had realized, maybe for the first time, that he really has no idea what happened to Shiro on the Kerberos mission. He had pressed a kiss to Shiro's forehead without thinking (like he would have a thousand years ago, back on Earth, back when they had been--) and Shiro had looked even more terrified, and Keith had wondered if maybe there wasn't any way for this all to be okay.

.

"Mind if I spar with you?" Shiro says. Keith looks up, brushes the hair out of his eyes. Shiro's face is kind and his question is filled with a sort of practiced nonchalance, but after all the time they've spent avoiding each other, he knows that the question is anything but.

He nods, despite himself. He knows that this is an olive branch, and it's hard to hold onto the anger that's been building over these last few weeks when Shiro is right here, studying his face. "Do you want to fight the gladiator, or...?"

"The gladiator's good," Shiro says, a half-second too late. He calls up the training program, sets it one level higher than what Keith had been training at when he'd come in. Keith readies his sword, and at his back, Shiro's hand flickers on.

They take down the training program, and the programs one, two, and three levels higher, fighting side by side for what feels like hours. They don't talk much, but it doesn't feel like they have to; for a moment, it almost feels like nothing had ever changed. 

When they are finished, they move to the lounge. Keith flops onto one of the sofas, grinning and exhausted. Shiro looks happy too; he takes a more careful seat slightly too close on Keith's right and says: "Can I tell you something stupid?"

Keith wants to get indignant. He wants to get angry, to bring up the weeks that Shiro has spent avoiding him, to have all the dumb arguments he has been having with himself during all the time he's spent alone in the training deck. 

Instead, he says: "Sure."

Shiro takes a deep breath and says, "I've been avoiding you."

Keith can't stifle the snort this elicits. "Really. That's pretty stupid," he agrees, trying to keep his tone light. "Why would you do a thing like that?"

"I don't know what happened to me, the year I spent with the Galra. I'm remembering bits and pieces, but everything I _do_ remember is terrible. It was all designed to turn me into a monster, Keith, and--I worried that they'd succeeded."

Keith looks at Shiro. He isn't making eye contact, his face downcast, and his left thumb is rubbing absentmindedly at the spot on his metal right wrist where his pulse would be. He looks so _sad_ , and something bright and fierce ignites in Keith's chest. "So you avoided me because, what, you thought you were a monster? We fight against real monsters every day, and you honestly thought you were a monster?"

"I thought I would hurt you. I mean, I was worried I would hurt everybody, but especially you."

"You thought I should be scared of you?" Keith's voice is raising in pitch and volume without his meaning it to.

"I was worried you wouldn't be." Shiro is quiet, and as Keith tries to figure out how to respond to that without shouting, Shiro tackles him to the sofa with absolutely no warning. Keith isn't expecting it at all--presumably it's meant to demonstrate how dangerous Shiro is, how easy it is to take Keith off-guard when he's around people he trusts--so he's completely overwhelmed before he even realizes what's going on. Shiro's left arm is pressed dangerously across his chest, his right arm is supporting his upper body, and his lower body has Keith pinned to the sofa. "I could be dangerous, Keith. I could hurt you."

The bright, fierce feeling turns serene as he stares up at Shiro. "But you won't." Keith is more sure of this than he has been of anything else since they left Earth.

"I don't want to, but that doesn't mean I won't--" Shiro stops talking abruptly, because suddenly his face is about half an inch away from Keith's.

Keith turns his head to look at Shiro's right arm, which appears to be sunk into the sofa up to the elbow. He can't help it; he starts laughing. "Did you just--"

"Not a word," Shiro warns, and he slumps against Keith's shoulder.

"Are you stuck? Because I can probably maneuver out of here if you need me to."

"No, no, I'm not stuck, just trying to figure out how to get it back out without doing more damage to the sofa." Shiro makes no move to extricate himself, though, just stays where he is, his head nestled against Keith's shoulder, their bodies flush against each other.

"You know, if you'd wanted to do this--" Keith gestures vaguely at the two of them with the arm Shiro doesn't currently have pinned.

("It was an accident!" Shiro protests.)

"--you didn't have to destroy the sofa, you could have just asked."

Shiro sighs. "I know. Can I tell you something stupid?"

"Stupider than this? It's worked well for you so far tonight; go for it."

There's a pause, one that Keith recognizes, one that means Shiro is trying to organize his thoughts. There had been a lot of those silences in the lead-up to the Kerberos mission, and Keith feels like he's welcoming back an old friend. Eventually, Shiro speaks, and he says: "That relief you've been feeling, in the Voltron fights? It's been from me." Keith could have guessed, but he can tell that Shiro isn't done, so he doesn't interrupt. "It's not that I didn't believe you were going to come through, but--ugh, this sounds ridiculous. When we're Voltron, I have a robotic right arm too, but I can trust it, because it's _you_. The Voltron robot arm doesn't do all the things my Galra arm does. It doesn't twitch or hurt or turn on by itself. I can count on it. Even while I tried to keep you away from me and my robot arm, there you were, my robot arm, keeping me calm and safe."

When Keith says nothing--because he is still boggling, trying to figure out how to translate this feeling of joy into useful words--Shiro sighs into Keith's shoulder and props himself up onto his free elbow. "Would you mind getting out from under there? I think I can get myself out of here, but I'm gonna need some room to move without putting my elbow into your solar plexus."

Keith nods, grinning easily, and he wriggles his way out from under Shiro, which is a movement he really hadn't expected to have to do when the evening had started. Shiro's situation looks even funnier once Keith is standing--his right arm disappears through the solid sofa with no warning. He watches as Shiro manages to get his arm out with minimal damage to the sofa, but as it is, when he's finally extricated, there's still a hole in the middle of the sofa that's shaped mostly like a handprint.

They stare down at it.

"Do you think anyone will notice?" Keith asks. It is impossible not to notice.

"We could cover it with something? This would be so much easier if the Alteans had throw pillows."

To stave off Shiro's obviously-growing distress, Keith steps between him and the sofa and says, "So, I'm your favorite robot arm?"

Shiro looks away from the sofa, up at Keith's face, and smiles. "Yes, Keith," he confirms. "You're my favorite robot arm."

"I'm your favorite robot arm," Keith repeats. He still can't quite believe it.

"Yes, and I'm starting to regret telling you that," Shiro says, his tone making it obvious that that's not at all true.

"Not as much as you'll regret it once I tell Lance."

Shiro's eyes go wide. "You _wouldn't_."

"I wouldn't." Keith laughs. "You really think that I would--" He doesn't get to finish the sentence, because Shiro puts a hand--his robot hand--on the side of Keith's face and pulls him close to kiss him.

"I missed you," Shiro says, a little breathless, pressing their foreheads together.

"I missed you too," Keith says. "I'm glad you came back." He kisses Shiro again.

.

Keith and Shiro awaken the next morning to the sound of Coran shouting. It sounds like he is in the corridor right outside Keith's quarters, and they should probably get up and see what he wants, but...

"It's can't be _too_ much of of an emergency," Keith argues, tugging Shiro back onto the bed. "If they needed Voltron, they would have used the alarm system."

"You know he's not going to stop yelling until we're all out there." Shiro's right, of course, but still, they spend a good ten minutes touching and kissing and smiling at each other before they manage to make themselves mostly decent and present themselves in the corridor.

Outside, they find Coran standing in front of Pidge, Lance, and Hunk, looking apoplectic. "There you are!" he shouts at them. "What took you so long?"

Keith is trying his best to keep a straight face, but he's pretty sure that his expression is on the smug side of neutral; a glance over at Shiro shows him trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile. On their other side, Keith can see the realization dawning on the faces of the other paladins.

"No excuse, eh? Well then, maybe one of you can tell me what's happened in the lounge!"

"What's happened in the lounge?" Shiro repeats.

"I'll tell you what's happened in the lounge! Somebody's left a bloody great hole in one of the sofas!"

It is the best sound Keith has ever heard when Shiro bursts out laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT ROBOT ARMS, OKAY


End file.
